Dear all,
I am just beginning to help a group with a community portal site and am wondering if anyone can offer comments on whether Drupal would be an appropriate CMS solution vs. a "roll your own" or other CMS solution.
This group is essentially creating a CitySearch-like portal site for Af-Am businesses, venues, events etc in 50 US cities. Each city receives its own page which is generated from a backend database of businesses, articles, advertizements etc for that city.
At this point, the group has produced the front-end GUI for the home page(s), and a basic MySQL database (which is at many places not tied in, nor populated with data) and a admin tool to access/populate the database.
Compared to the Drupal sites that I have looked at during the previous 2 hrs, their home pages are very rich, graphically and otherwise, and I wonder if it is feasible to recreate this structure in Drupal vs "rolling their own."
Equally, they envision many features-- such as business accounts which allow the business to upload a small graphic logo, customizable fields about their business, calendar events-- for which it is not clear to me if Drupal is well-suited.
DDEV is the official local development tool of Drupal. And like Drupal, DDEV depends on the support of the open source community.
